It's the New American Holiday.Bruce Sterling takes the kids to the Temporary Autonomous Zone,where survival is a personal choice.

By Bruce Sterling

Thursday, August 29

Stopped at the gas station for directions to the Burning Man Festival. Grizzled, portly Nevadan local growls: "If ya have to ask, you don't belong there!"

As if anybody was gonna drive all the way to Gerlach, Nevada (population 340), for some other reason.The gas station was packed with mobile homes and junker slackermobiles. The guy relented and gave us directions. Seems a multiple-pierced and tattooed lovely in a clingy peach taffeta costume had melted his heart.

Drove 16 miles. Then drove another 12 miles across the bottom of a very dead lake. Driving across the playa is like space travel: you point the front of the vehicle into emptiness and launch. Gaseous tails of flying white dust spurt up like jet exhaust. Cars and trucks leave huge wakes on the horizon, like white prairie fires. If the wind kicks up, the world becomes a twilight zone of milky haze. Driving fast in a whiteout dust fog is an excellent way to get killed.

We're in a 22-foot Ford recreational vehicle, in which I've brought the family to Burning Man: Nancy Sterling (wife, mom), Amy Sterling (9 years), and the littlest desert fox, Laura of Arabia, a hardened travel veteran at 4 months. We've never lived in an RV before. It's a mutant cross between an aircraft and a small chunk of suburbia. It's brand-new, but it shudders, moans, vibrates, rattles, squeaks, and emits foul generator exhaust.

Reached the camp, found a place to park, got out to walk around. Maybe 500 vehicles here already. People are setting up tents, parachutes, awnings, tiki torches, tribal flags. The lake bed is a Euclidean plane with zillions of dry fractal cracks. The parched Nevada mountains of the Black Rock Desert rise on three sides. Weary treeless hills full of sullen majesty.

Friday, August 30

A guy got killed last night. He rear-ended a truck while zooming along the darkened playa on a blacked-out motorcycle.

The place feels like the afterlife. When you walk across it, you just drift over endless cracked whiteness, lifting your feet maybe a quarter inch from the surface. It's all mobile; it's all temporary. Twist the ignition key and drift with the wind.

Burning Man is an art gig by tradition. Over the longer term it's evolved into something else; maybe something like a physical version of the Internet. The art here is like fan art. It's very throwaway, very appropriative, very cut-and-paste. The camp is like a giant swap meet where no one sells stuff, but people trade postures, clip art, and attitude. People come here in clumps: performance people, drumming enthusiasts, site-specific sculptors, sailplane people, ravers, journalists, cops. I'm a journalist and a newbie, but even I can tell the pros from my fellow newbies. The veterans have brought their own pennants, bicycles, flashlights, and tiki torches, plus enough water for anything.

The alkali dust is like a fine and bitter talcum. It gets into everything, so why fight it? Just throw off your clothes. Keep maybe a straw hat, shades, and boots. Throwing off all your clothes is the cheapest, quickest way that was ever invented to cop an attitude. It's also a cool youth-culture solidarity move. Young people look great without clothes. Young people don't need 'em.

Vehicles have scattered all over the playa. It's as if a giant bowl of mixed nuts had dropped off a kitchen counter onto white linoleum. The parachute-covered Central Camp does duty as the broken bowl. All around it are cashews, peanuts, and sunflower seeds: dinky pup tents, some bigger pop tents, RVs, pickups, trailers. There's even an honest-to-goodness geodome erected by some ambitious guys who have brought a crane. Their towering construction crane arouses much envy, and they get to boast of having "the biggest tech on the playa."

The streets are vaporous formalities. They're premarked with tiny colored plastic flags: the flags get bent, they get stepped on, they even get run over. But once the idea of a street is established, the community standard holds.

You're not supposed to throw anything away on the playa. You're supposed to leave nothing at all. The idea of leaving no visible trace is a central part of the Burning Man zeitgeist, a performance-art process move. The organizers are very specifically eco-correct - maybe because they're so lighthearted about tolerating most anything
else.

Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com) lives in Austin, Texas. His latest book is Holy Fire. Talk with Bruce Sterling on Wednesday, November 6, at 5 p.m. in the Wired Arena (www.wired.com/arena/).